Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Constitutional Neoconmen

Neocons like Levin, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh who now fancy themselves as constitutionalists since there is a Democrat in the White House are hypocrites of the first order. All during the eight years of the Bush regime their standard response to anyone who would object to the PATRIOT Act and myriad other attacks on constitutional liberty was to proclaim that "9/11 changed everything." Translation: the hell with the constitution; we’re engaged in a never-ending "war on terra," as George W. Bush called it. We need to destroy our constitutional liberties in order to protect our constitutional liberties, they told us. It is the hatred of those liberties by people in the Middle East that caused the terrorists to attack us on 9/11, they ludicrously proclaimed (and still do).

War is not just "the health of the state," as Randolph Bourne sagely stated in his famous essay of that title; it is the health of unlimited and unconstitutional government. Governmental powers always ratchet up during wartime at the expense of constitutional liberty (and prosperity) despite the fact that every federal politician, and every soldier, takes an oath to do the opposite – to defend the Constitution. This notorious "ratchet effect" is described in great detail in Robert Higgs’s classic book, Crisis and Leviathan.

No comments:

opinions powered by SendLove.to